Heart of a Dog

Musician and artist Laurie Anderson’s award-winning documentary Heart of a Dog is a wry, moving and inventive meditation on life, love and loss. A beautiful dreamscape of a film that weaves together childhood memories, video diaries, philosophical musings, heartfelt tributes to the people who inspire her and the humanity that connects us all.

Funny, thoughtful and challenging in equal parts, Heart of a Dog is an entirely original cinematic experience.

Heart of a Dog began as a short essay-film commissioned by the Franco-German public television station Arte. It was part of a series that involved artists talking about the meaning of life and their work. Anderson was in Paris presenting a solo show that featured her beloved pet, Lolabelle and Arte commissioner Luciano Rigolini suggested, “How about some of those stories about your dog? That’s philosophy, no?”

Anderson’s career spans decades and mediums, including music, theatre, drawing, performance. Heart of a Dog marks her first foray into film since her 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave, and contains many of her signature and themes such as the investigation of language, use of multimedia and engaging with technology.

The initial working title for Heart of a Dog was a line from David Foster Wallace that reads, “Every love story is a ghost story.” In the space of a few years, Anderson lost her beloved rat-terrier, Lolabelle and her husband and artistic collaborator, Lou Reed. In Heart of a Dog, these experiences serve as a focus for a wider examination on the nature of death and the afterlife.

The free ranging narrative also dives into family, memory, the passing of time and love. All this thinking leads Anderson to muse on the current obsessions with surveillance, information storage and to ask “What are they doing with our information? The conversation you had with your boss two days ago is parked up there in the Cloud, but to what end?”